Though Mother Nature surely gains
When you grow trees on your remains
I find it more moral
To mix in with coral
For all of the fish it sustains
Though Mother Nature surely gains
When you grow trees on your remains
I find it more moral
To mix in with coral
For all of the fish it sustains
… the handshake line. Others are defending it.
For those opposed, the call is for something more appropriate, with many arguing for a circular firing squad.
I won’t bother linking you to anything. Just put the name of the Mafia’s bank in your news search and enjoy.
We practice progressive stacking when calling upon people to participate in class discussion. .. [If] you are white, male, or someone privileged by the racial and gender structures of our society… we will often ask you to hold off…
UD has tried to find out more about the Binghamton University professor who put this on her syllabus, but for some reason she has been 404’d by the school, and as for her home page, fuggedaboutit.
There’s this – hasn’t been taken down yet, but now that I’ve linked to it, it might be.
The school has made her take the language off the syllabus, but it’s probably too late for Binghamton to do anything about the (legal?) complaints it’s going to be fielding. As for embarrassment about the bigot on the faculty, well, you hired her.
No one pulled out a gun and killed everyone. It was just a huge brawl, started by the University of Michigan basketball coach. By current American standards, it was sportsmanship of the highest order.
But then, UM is a very classy school.
A Supermarket in California!
*************************
What thoughts I have of you tonight
Walt Whitman, Allen Ginsberg
As I scan the parking lot
Of the Walmart in Waukegan
**************************
Two strangers in SUVs met
On that fruited plain
They blew each other away
With their Glocks
***************************
As one they shot; as one staggered
Into their SUVs
As one staggered
Into the local emergency room
As one were arrested
**********************
O Whitman, O Ginsberg! O Walmart Waukegan parking lot!
I stagger beside you, dreaming of the lost America of love
Past blue automobiles in driveways, home to our silent cottage
[The Freedom from Religion Foundation contacted] Cabell County Schools administrators in 2017 and 2019 regarding religious activities taking place in schools. … “Despite FFRF’s prior warnings, … adults have continued to promote religion to Cabell County students during the school day, including through religious assemblies,” the lawsuit states.
Three strikes you’re sued, I guess. And it’s about time. No fan of promiscuous litigation, UD nonetheless has long argued on these pages that hopeless recidivists – and fanatics just can’t help it – can only be controlled, in many cases, via the legal system.
Horny haredim, for instance, are always going to stand up on airplanes and demand seating that does not torment them through the proximity of female flesh; and the only way to control this behavior has been to throw them off the airplane when they do their thing.
I mean, the only way for an airline to avoid endless $500,000 a pop successful lawsuits brought by harlots publicly forced to change their seats is to throw the haredim off the plane. Or threaten to do so. Which now routinely happens.
Similarly, it’s quite clear from the incorrigible behavior of Huntington High School’s principal that he perceives his teenage charges as lambs of Christ whether they like it or not, and no heathen “foundation” is going to stand in the way of his herding and revivaling them. Only the principled removal of the principal, plus painful financial penalties against the school district, will begin to perform the miracle of making the blind see in West Virginia.
**********************
‘Course ol’ UD is also waiting for the part where it turns out the principal’s receiving kickbacks from Nik, the mentally challenged revivalist in question, per teenage hellion butts the principal puts in seats. Or whatever. There’s got to be some form of money corruption at play here; it wouldn’t be Jim Bakker-style revivalism without it. Let’s wait and see.
More depressed drunk dudes with forty guns in their house blast their heads off in Wyoming than in any other American state, and the state aims to keep it that way. A pathetic suicide hotline, virtually no psychiatrists, guns up the wazoo, stoic lonely cowboy culture, no interest even in talking about it – Wyoming has refined the suicide brew to the point where its national blasted-head dominance is unquestioned. Rates in the US are around 13 suicides per 100,000 people; it’s not unusual to find counties in Wyoming where rates are over 50 per 100,000.
So here’s a typical (rare) article about suicide in Wyoming. The graphic shows the one demographic least likely to do the deed – a white woman. The article itself fails to put guns front and center, even though it’s clear to the densest idiot that suicide rates are way higher in states where gun ownership is highest, and lowest where ownership is lowest.
But of course Wyoming doesn’t want to go there; it doesn’t want to say anything negative about our bestest bud Mr Beretta.
4,000 luxury Porsches and Bentleys
4,000 luxury roadsters so boss
4,000 highest-end sports cars submerged
How do you measure so tragic a loss? …
******************************
One hundred twenty three thousand brand new Boxster Spyder
Its frozen-berry metallic all up in smoke
4,000 innocent hearts of America
Now and forever bereft and broke

We’re fierce. We both scored in the 400’s, and, despite a few points difference, we called it a tie.
So nu, so far John Wilson is just a capitalist, and a morally exemplary one at that. He doesn’t seem to have, for instance, stolen billions of dollars from poor Malaysians. He just bribed a dude to make sure his three dumdum kids got into good colleges. By prevailing Goldman Sachs standards, his lying, cheating, and depriving actually worthy applicants of a seat at Stanford, is petty crime at best.
So he got a pretty petty sentence – a year and some change in jail.
Ken Kurson, a veteran member in good standing of the crazyass criminal Trump circle, must have thought his presidential pardon meant smooth cyberstalking; but turns out “Presidential pardons do not shield against state charges.” And the state of New York has successfully gone after the creep for spying on his ex-wife.
And here’s a fun fact!
[Mr. Kurson’s legal problems began when he] was nominated for a seat on the board of the National Endowment for the Humanities in 2018.
Those pesky background checks! But hey. Speaking as an English professor, I gotta say: He don’t even got a BA! And while he’d be a natural at reviewing paranoid fiction proposals, he seems a mite surprising, overall, as an NEH guy.
And I’m following the mess closely. I haven’t written about it yet because I need to know a lot more about the particular circumstances, regions, histories, politics, before I venture an opinion. I’m reading, reading, and reading.
Dr. Bernard Carroll, known as the "conscience of psychiatry," contributed to various blogs, including Margaret Soltan's University Diaries, for which he sometimes wrote limericks under the name Adam.
New York Times
George Washington University English professor Margaret Soltan writes a blog called University Diaries, in which she decries the Twilight Zone-ish state our holy land’s institutes of higher ed find themselves in these days.
The Electron Pencil
It’s [UD's] intellectual honesty that makes her blog required reading.
Professor Mondo
There's always something delightful and thought intriguing to be found at Margaret Soltan's no-holds-barred, firebrand tinged blog about university life.
AcademicPub
You can get your RDA of academic liars, cheats, and greedy frauds at University Diaries. All disciplines, plus athletics.
truffula, commenting at Historiann
Margaret Soltan at University Diaries blogs superbly and tirelessly about [university sports] corruption.
Dagblog
University Diaries. Hosted by Margaret Soltan, professor of English at George Washington University. Boy is she pissed — mostly about athletics and funding, the usual scandals — but also about distance learning and diploma mills. She likes poems too. And she sings.
Dissent: The Blog
[UD belittles] Mrs. Palin's degree in communications from the University of Idaho...
The Wall Street Journal
Professor Margaret Soltan, blogging at University Diaries... provide[s] an important voice that challenges the status quo.
Lee Skallerup Bessette, Inside Higher Education
[University Diaries offers] the kind of attention to detail in the use of language that makes reading worthwhile.
Sean Dorrance Kelly, Harvard University
Margaret Soltan's ire is a national treasure.
Roland Greene, Stanford University
The irrepressibly to-the-point Margaret Soltan...
Carlat Psychiatry Blog
Margaret Soltan, whose blog lords it over the rest of ours like a benevolent tyrant...
Perplexed with Narrow Passages
Margaret Soltan is no fan of college sports and her diatribes on the subject can be condescending and annoying. But she makes a good point here...
Outside the Beltway
From Margaret Soltan's excellent coverage of the Bernard Madoff scandal comes this tip...
Money Law
University Diaries offers a long-running, focused, and extremely effective critique of the university as we know it.
Anthony Grafton, American Historical Association
The inimitable Margaret Soltan is, as usual, worth reading. ...
Medical Humanities Blog
I awake this morning to find that the excellent Margaret Soltan has linked here and thereby singlehandedly given [this blog] its heaviest traffic...
Ducks and Drakes
As Margaret Soltan, one of the best academic bloggers, points out, pressure is mounting ...
The Bitch Girls
Many of us bloggers worry that we don’t post enough to keep people’s interest: Margaret Soltan posts every day, and I more or less thought she was the gold standard.
Tenured Radical
University Diaries by Margaret Soltan is one of the best windows onto US university life that I know.
Mary Beard, A Don's Life
[University Diaries offers] a broad sense of what's going on in education today, framed by a passionate and knowledgeable reporter.
More magazine, Canada
If deity were an elected office, I would quit my job to get her on the ballot.
Notes of a Neophyte